Tools You Need To Have A Great Tour Operator Website

If you are reading this, you are probably a tour operator, travel business, or a travel agent who doesn’t have a high performing travel website yet.

You are considering building a travel agency website and do not know how to go about it, or you already have a travel website, but don’t know how to leverage it.

So, let’s begin with why would you want a travel website?

A travel agency website will first and foremost get you an online presence which is very important in today’s digital world. An online presence introduces your business to the world and helps build your brand, something any travel agent would love to benefit from. Your website also acts as a platform to showcase your products and the packages on offer.

What are you trying to achieve through a travel agency website?

Most travellers today do not have the time to find a good travel agent. Hence, they opt to go online and do a simple Google search. Your primary goal is to reach out to these travellers and grab their attention. A good website needs three essential elements: good design, compelling content, and easy maintenance.

If you want to know more about what you need to do before deciding to build a travel agency website, you will find everything here: “How To Make A Website”

What helps in making a travel agency website successful?

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Social media integration

Social media is an essential aspect of marketing. Most brands leverage this medium and build marketing campaigns around it. The best part of social media is you can also do it for free or at a little cost.

The best way to integrate social media is to include social share and follow buttons on your travel website. Visitors can then share your content with ease if they like it. For example, if you place an offer on flights to a specific destination, visitors could share this on social media which brings even more traffic to your website.

You should also consider providing users with social login. According to studies, 73% of the users on the internet prefer signing in to a website using their social logins. It saves them the time to create a new account, increasing stickiness and repeat visitors to your website. You should also plan to leverage this data to design personalised marketing campaigns to target these users.

2

Email integration

While social media works great, email marketing is one of the best methods for awesome business RoI. Most users will respond via emails, reach out to you, inquire about rates, and report issues via this medium. The first thing that most people spontaneously do once they get to work is to read their emails. Emails should be used smartly to support the campaigns that you run for your business.

3

Digital marketing

Today, 60% of leisure and 41% of business travellers make their travel arrangements via a travel agency website. Most big winners in the travel industry benefit massively from investing in digital marketing. Digital makes it possible to engage communities and reach a specific target audience.

4

Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you better understand traffic, dissecting them by the geography, demography, time on page, and many other criteria. You should install the right tracking codes and mechanisms on your website so that you are ready to track and understand your traffic from Day-1.

5

Conversion tracking

Online marketing campaigns are heavily reliant on conversions. They have only one goal, to get your target audience to act. Conversion tracking is of great help here. The higher the number of conversions means your campaign is doing what it was meant to do precisely and if the numbers are low you might have to rethink on what you are doing.

What are the tools you can use to build your travel agency website?

Creating a travel agency website is easier than ever before. For those who do not prefer hiring a website developer, you can opt for website builders such as Wix, WordPress, Weebly and Godaddy.

How do these website builders compare against each other? Find out here.

While the development part is taken care of by these website builders, there are other aspects such as design, images, banners, digital and email marketing etc. that you might need help with. There are simple online tools that will help you solve this problem and it can be done with just a few clicks. Here are some for your consideration:

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Design tools

Design is paramount to any digital marketing campaign. Compelling designs make it easy to lure your visitors into acting on your campaign. If you feel confident on design, you can use these design tools online. You don’t have to have any previous experience with graphic design to use them.

Canva

We’ve added a Canva is a user-friendly graphic design tool which helps bloggers, digital marketers, businesses and other professionals create eye-catching designs without any graphic design experience. The online graphic design tool has several features which are simple to use. Some prominent feature includes quality images, illustrations, templates and fonts.

While you can do most of the things for free on Canva, you can also go for a paid account which opens a wide array of features, and it will cost you just $9.95 per month when paid annually or $12.95 paid monthly.

Stencil

Stencil is one of the best and fastest ways to improve your engagement on social media. Stencil grants you access to some of the most exquisite photos and quotes which could help you better your business. The design tool allows you to create compelling designs and it is simple-to-learn and easy-to-use. Some of its main features include breathtaking templates, background photos, upload and store logos, quotes, upload fonts, Google web fonts, easy customisation and icons and graphics.

Stencil has a free account but if you are looking for more it will cost you $9 a month of paid annually for a pro membership where you can create 50 images a month and if you need more than that you can opt for the unlimited membership which you cost you as less as $12 a month if paid annually.

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Email marketing tools

Email marketing is an essential tool for a travel agency website or business and one of the most simple and easy to use tool that can help you a great deal here is a great email service provider.

MailChimp

MailChimp has inbuilt tools that help you collect leads, create emails, and send them out. The E-mail tool even has a mobile app to help you craft and send out marketing campaigns from an Android or iOS device. MailChimp is easy to use, and it will cost you nothing if you want to give it a try. However, their paid services start from $10 a month.

GetResponse

GetResponse is another popular tool for designing and sending HTML e-newsletters. This tool helps you import and host a mailing list while capturing data onto it. You can create customised e-newsletters which can be quickly sent to the subscribers on your mailing list. Your e-mails can be automated, and you can also analyse statistics regarding your email marketing campaigns.

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Integrated Marketing

Integrated marketing ensures that all messaging and communication strategies are consistent across all channels and platforms. It blends all aspects of marketing such as public relations, direct marketing, advertising, sales promotion and social media. With the introduction of new digital marketing platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and existing platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter integrated marketing has never been more critical or difficult to handle. There are simple tools that can help you with this.

Hubspot plus

HubSpot is the top marketing automation tool right now.It lets you focus on creating exceptional content, without having to worry about the technical details of website management. HubSpot aligns sales and marketing and helps to track social media ROI. This tool can be integrated smoothly with a wide variety of business softwares, thus making your life easier. If you do not have much knowledge about search engine optimisation, HubSpot’sinbuilt SEO feature makes sure your content ranks well on Google.

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Videos

Videos are an essential part of marketing. It is easy for the human brain to follow texts with illustrations. Infact323% better than just a regular video. Producing videos needn’t be an expensive affair anymore. Moreover, not everyone has high-end equipment, patience or the time to produce these videos. That’s where online video creating tools make the process simple and easy to execute, without you needing video editing experience to use them.

Moovly

Moovly is one of the best platforms online to create an animated video with infographics. This online video editor has some brilliant features that will help your Travel agency website stand out from the rest. You can use sounds, music, animation, and real photos or video to make animated infographic video, display ads – both banner and skyscraper ads, presentations, e-cards and everything else.

Moovly is free to use, but it provides limited features. However, if you want more, you could go for the paid services for just $5 per month.

Animoto

As a travel agency website, you might be looking at making a photo-based video to entice your audience with breathtaking locations. This is where Animoto could be a useful tool. If you are not looking for anything fancy, you can merely put images together and create a simple yet elegant slideshow. However, if want more and decide to create proper marketing video, Animoto offers different aspect ratios especially keeping social platforms in mind and set templates that could help promote your business.

What if you are considering outsourcing it to an agency?

Outsourcing does often save time and effort. You can also get a professional’s point of view on what is needed and how to get it done. However, it is not going to be cheap. The cost of outsourcing a travel agency website would be in the range of $2000 – $5000 with simple functionality. However, if you are looking for a website with advanced features, be ready to fork out up to $30,000.

This is a massive one-time payment so think wisely before you invest because it is difficult to back out once the money is spent. Apart from the cost, once the website is built and additional changes have to be made, keep in mind you will have to bear further costs. Building these website does take time to give yourself a few months time. An agency may also take anywhere between 2 to 6 months to build your website.

So what is the best option to get a travel agency website built?

Consider using SaaS (Software as a service) based platforms if you do not want to build a website by yourself. VacationLabs provides these services at a reasonable cost. This is because we distribute the cost across clients. Since you make small monthly payments, it is not going to pinch your pocket, and the cost is distributed over a span of time until you opt to use the services. Hence it is much more reasonable, and you can get out anytime you wish if you are not happy. Since it is a SAAS based service, you don’t have to wait for months to avail it.